The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD

This report presents a comprehensive overview of recent and longer-term trends in productivity levels and growth in OECD countries, accession countries, key partners and some G20 countries.

Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth presents a selection of recent research advances on long term economic growth. While the contributions stem from both economic history, macro- and microeconomics and the economics of innovation, all papers depart from a common viewpoint: the key factor behind long term growth is productivity, and the latter is primarily driven by technological change. Most contributions show implicitly or explicitly that technological change is at least partly dependent on growth itself. Furthermore, technology appears to interact strongly with investment in physical and human capital as well as with changes in historical, political and institutional settings. Together these papers are an up-to-date account of the remarkable convergence in theoretical and empirical work on productivity and growth over the past decades. The first part deals with the characteristics of growth regimes over longer periods, ranging from 20 years to two centuries. The next four chapters study the determinants of productivity growth and, in some cases, productivity slowdown during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The final five chapters focus on the role of technology and innovation as the key determinants of growth. Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth is, therefore, a welcome collection for academic scholars and graduate students in economics, history and related social sciences as well as for policy makers.

Throughout the book the authors aim to show how the market can function more efficiently and offer policy recommendations to show how regulatory reform can improve competitiveness at the firm level as well as performance at the industry, national and EU levels.

The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and the resumption of productivity growth in the 1990s have provoked controversy among policymakers and researchers. Economists have been forced to reexamine fundamental questions of measurement technique. Some researchers argue that econometric approaches to productivity measurement usefully address shortcomings of the dominant index number techniques while others maintain that current productivity statistics underreport damage to the environment. In this book, the contributors propose innovative approaches to these issues. The result is a state-of-the-art exposition of contemporary productivity analysis. Charles R. Hulten is professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He has been a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and is chair of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Michael Harper is chief of the Division of Productivity Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Edwin R. Dean, formerly associate commissioner for Productivity and Technology at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is adjunct professor of economics at The George Washington University.

This book addresses the rising productivity gap between the global frontier and other firms, and identifies a number of structural impediments constraining business start-ups, knowledge diffusion and resource allocation (such as barriers to up-scaling and relatively high rates of skill mismatch).